FREE Email Newsletter

A new study from Children's Hospital Boston's Division of Emergency Medicine has found that holiday decorations, particularly glass ornaments, are one more safety hazard parents must consider during the season. A review of records from Children's Emergency Department revealed an average of five ornament-related injuries per year, of which, more than half involve a child eating fragments of these ornaments, including batteries and pieces of glass.

I sat in the cargo bay of a Marsplane, somewhere over the depths of Valles Marineris. We had received a distress call from a field geologist gathering samples- or rather, from his suit. He wasn't talking, and that by itself was a bad thing. The only option was to send a medic, and the only way to get to him in time was in the rocket-powered aircraft MARSEC (the Mars Expoloration Corporation) used to drop supplies to outposts across the vast planet.

Cardinal Health’s SmartGown™ surgical gown is a breathable, fully-impervious surgical gown in the industry. Features of the gown include:
Classification as AAMI Level 4.
The ability to provide a high level of protection when dealing with the risk of liquid and viral penetration.

December 15, 2009
GE Healthcare introduces new, powerful clinical visualization tools to allow interventional radiologists to see more than ever before. This includes the Innova® 4100IQ. Debuted at RSNA 2009, the next-generation Innova 4100IQ coupled with the innovative Advantage Workstation® VolumeShare™ 4 is a complete X-ray imaging solution that gives interventional radiologists the tools they need to take image-based diagnosis and minimally invasive therapy to a higher level.

December 15, 2009
At the RSNA Annual Meeting in Chicago, medical display manufacturer Barco showcased the latest addition to its line of 'Fusion' diagnostic display systems. The new display product, named Coronis Fusion 10MP, featuring:
A high-bright 30-inch grayscale LCD panel which can be driven as two seamless 5 MegaPixel heads or one wide-screen 10 MegaPixel display.

December 15, 2009
Medicus Health carries Respiratory Hygiene Stations that are designed to work with standard hand sanitizer pumps or foam/hands free dispensers. Both units are also available with key locks for the face mask and tissue box compartment or without locks.

As I sit here in a medical innovation conference, I find myself becoming more and more angered by one of the speakers. A man with an MBA and fancy title from PriceWaterhouseCoopers is lecturing us about how doctors are essentially money-grubbing, change-resistant, quality-care avoiding “pains in the you-know-what,” obstructing progress in healthcare reform and blocking technology adoption.

DxNA has announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration has granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for its 2009 H1N1 influenza virus diagnostic test for use in DxNA’s GeneSTATTM detection platform. According to the company, the new platform enables faster detection of the virus in a portable composition that weighs less than 10 pounds.

At www.cnn.com you can find what they feel are the top medical developments for 2009. Here are the first five, with the conclusion appearing tomorrow.
10. Warm Organ Perfusion Device.
Currently, organs waiting to be transplanted are rushed to the patient in a freezer, but after five hours the heart or lung or liver has usually deteriorated so much that it becomes useless.

JoAnne Allen, Reuters
Americans may live significantly longer in the future than current U.S. government projections, and that could mean sharply higher costs than anticipated for Medicare and other programs, researchers have reported.
By 2050 Americans may live as much as eight years longer than government forecasts, and that spending by Medicare and Social Security could rise by as much as $8.

The pain in Dan Abrams' leg throbbed so much he could barely stand. Still, the 60-year-old Somerville, NJ resident, who friends say had just canceled his health insurance because of the tough economy, debated from a hospital emergency room whether he should stay and run up thousands of dollars in debt, or take antibiotics from home and hope they arrested the mysterious infection in his leg.

A Miami hotel has been evacuated after one guest died and two more fell ill from contaminated drinking water. The hotel in question is the Luxury Epic in downtown Miami – which was housing more than 300 guests at the time of the evacuation.
On Sunday, all guests were relocated to surrounding hotels, following a cluster of physical illnesses.

One morning as a medical student on the surgery service, I learned about a patient who had been hemorrhaging on the operating table the night before. The intern who had assisted during the operation took great pains to describe every detail of the failed efforts of several senior surgeons and the final, ultimately lifesaving, maneuvers of the department chairman.

Medivance offers the Arctic Sun® Temperature Management System, a thermoregulatory device that monitors and controls patient temperature within a range of 33°C to 37°C (91.4°F to 98.6°F). According to the company, the system exhibits:
The Model 2000 automated controller featuring:
The ability to monitor and control patient temperature
The ability to pull temperature-controlled water ranging between 4°C and 42°C (39.